ASCII 76 — L

The uppercase letter L (ASCII code 76) is the twelfth letter of the modern Latin alphabet, originated from the Phoenician lamedh (meaning goad) via Greek lambda. In English text, the letter l appears with a frequency of approximately 4.0%, ranking as the 11th most common letter. L appears in many fundamental English words and has the interesting property that its doubled form 'll' is common in loanwords from Welsh, Spanish, and Italian.

The 26 uppercase Latin letters span ASCII codes 65 through 90, forming the capital letter block of the character set. Their placement exactly 32 code positions before the corresponding lowercase letters (97–122) was a deliberate engineering decision enabling case conversion through toggling a single bit. Uppercase letters are essential for proper nouns, sentence openings, acronyms, and programming constants. Early computing systems often supported only uppercase characters, making ASCII's inclusion of both cases a forward-looking design choice.

In the ASCII encoding table, Uppercase Letter L is assigned code point 76 in decimal (0x4C hexadecimal, 114 octal, 01001100 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Uppercase Letter L works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.